Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠 (@nmcduvogu) - Twitter Profili

Sabitlenmiş Tweet

On August 15, 1971, President Nixon made one announcement that quietly changed everything. He cut the dollar's link to gold — "temporarily." 54 years later, it's still "temporary." Since that day: - The dollar lost 87% of its purchasing power - Workers stopped sharing in productivity gains - A single income stopped being enough - Home prices went from 2x your salary to 5x - Government debt went from $398 billion to $36 trillion - The savings rate collapsed - Inequality exploded Coincidence? I'll let you decide. For the next 17 days, I'm walking through the charts from wtfhappenedin1971.com, one topic per day, and explaining in plain English what each one means for your life. No jargon. Just data. Here's the schedule: Day 1 — What happened on August 15, 1971 Day 2 — Wages vs. Productivity Day 3 — Income Inequality Day 4 — The Death of the Single-Income Family Day 5 — Inflation and Shrinkflation Day 6 — Housing Day 7 — Gold Reserves and Bretton Woods Day 8 — Government Debt Day 9 — The Rise of the Financial Sector Day 10 — Speculation vs. Real Production Day 11 — The Savings Collapse Day 12 — Trade Balance Day 13 — Political Polarization Day 14 — Crime and Incarceration Day 15 — Family Breakdown Day 16 — Healthcare and Diet Day 17 — Connecting the Dots Bookmark this. By Day 17, you'll understand why everything feels broken.

English

1

0

2

320

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu·1d

@TimHaldorsson Already talking about Bitcoin, and adding AI to the loop. 😎

English

0

1

233

Tim Haldorsson@TimHaldorsson·1d

Let’s create a list of all creators based in Portugal talking about AI or crypto 🇵🇹 tag your favourite creator below

English

104

4

205

27.7K

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu·3d

Embora a desburocratização possa ajudar a aumentar a oferta, o problema vai continuar a persistir. Os preços da habitação, como os de tudo, resultam de uma relação basilar entre oferta e procura. A desburocratização visa atuar no lado da oferta, aumentando-a e equilibrando a balança, mas aqui está o problema: a procura vai continuar a crescer a uma velocidade muito maior do que a oferta. Porquê? Porque construir, com ou sem burocracia, leva tempo. E porque existem variáveis do lado da procura de que ninguém fala ou quer resolver. Por um lado, temos cada vez mais pessoas a procurar casa para a sua função primária, servir de moradia. Essa procura está a aumentar drasticamente, não só pelos portugueses mas também pelo fluxo abismal de pessoas que entram no país, provocando um crescimento dantesco na procura. Por outro, temos quem procure na habitação uma escapatória para a desvalorização propositada da moeda. As casas deixam de servir apenas como moradia e passam a carregar um prémio monetário, desempenhando uma função que o dinheiro por si só, ou um dinheiro forte, deveria fazer: ser uma reserva de valor. Resumindo, sim, a burocracia é um entrave à criação de oferta, mas está longe de resolver o problema enquanto não virmos o elefante na sala.

Português

1

0

3

164

Αntonio Nogueira Leite@al_antdp·3d

O tema da habitação preocupa-me desde antes da pandemia. Há muita conversa, medidas e power points. Do PS e do PSD. Mas as autarquias continuam a arrastar os pés, os autarcas têm medo q mexer nas estruturas, administração central a passo de caracol e qq projeto continua a ter de percorrer uma via crucis de autorizações por n entidades. Promotores beneficiam do mercado estrangeiro mas, se nada mudar, isto vai acabar muito mal para todos. Tenho dito.

Português

50

25

307

11.2K

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu·5d

Day 17 — Connecting the Dots x.com/nmcduvogu/stat…

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu

WTF Happened in 1971? — Day 17/17 Seventeen days. Fifteen charts. One answer. On August 15, 1971, the dollar's link to gold was severed. Money became a political tool with no natural limit. And since that day: Your productivity soared. Your wages didn't. (Day 2) Inequality exploded — not because of greed, but because new money flows to asset holders first and workers last. (Day 3) One income stopped being enough. Both parents had to work just to maintain what one salary used to cover. (Day 4) The dollar lost 87% of its purchasing power. Your soup can got smaller. (Day 5) Housing went from 2x your salary to 5x. Not because houses improved — because money got cheaper. (Day 6) The gold drained from the vault. France called the bluff, and the leash was removed — not because it failed, but because it worked. (Day 7) Government debt went from $398 billion to $36 trillion. No gold standard, no brake. (Day 8) The financial sector swallowed the economy. Half of all corporate profits now come from moving money, not making things. (Day 9) The stock market stopped reflecting the economy and started replacing it. Speculation became more rational than production. (Day 10) Savings became irrational. Why save money that loses value every year? (Day 11) The US trade balance flipped and never came back. America started exporting paper and importing real goods. (Day 12) Political polarization accelerated. Left and Right blame each other while ignoring the monetary disease underneath. (Day 13) Crime surged. Incarceration exploded five-fold. The state grew to manage the problems its own money created. (Day 14) Families stopped forming. Not because people stopped wanting them — because the economics made it impossible. (Day 15) Healthcare costs disconnected from reality. Diet quality collapsed. When money buys less, people eat worse and pay more to treat the consequences. (Day 16) Every one of these charts breaks at the same point. Every one of them traces back to the same cause. The money. This isn't a conspiracy. It's a structure. A system that transfers wealth from those who earn it to those who print it. From the future to the present. From the young to the old. From the productive to the connected. The Austrian economists — Mises, Hayek, Rothbard — described this mechanism decades before the charts confirmed it. Sound money keeps governments honest, incentives aligned, and time preference low. Fiat money does the opposite. The question isn't whether the system is broken. The charts prove it is. The question is: what are you going to do about it? There is one asset with a fixed supply that no government can print, no central bank can inflate, and no politician can debase. But that's a thread for another day.

English

0

9

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu·5d

Day 16 — Healthcare and Diet x.com/nmcduvogu/stat…

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu

WTF Happened in 1971? — Day 16/17 Healthcare costs in the US have risen faster than general inflation every single year since the early 1970s. The chart of healthcare spending vs. population growth shows costs completely disconnecting from the number of people being served. At the same time, the American diet changed dramatically. Meat consumption patterns shifted. Processed food consumption skyrocketed. Nutrition charts show a move away from whole foods toward cheaper, processed alternatives. These look like separate problems. They're not. When money loses purchasing power, people trade quality for affordability. A family in 1965 could afford whole foods, fresh meat, and regular meals on one income. A family today, squeezed by stagnant wages and rising costs, reaches for whatever is cheapest. Processed food is engineered to be cheap. It's calorie-dense, nutrient-poor, and profitable. The same inflation that made housing unaffordable made real food a luxury. And the health consequences followed — obesity, diabetes, heart disease — all of which drive healthcare costs higher. On the healthcare side, the same fiat money dynamics apply. Government involvement in healthcare expanded massively after the 1970s. When you fund healthcare with printed money and subsidized insurance, you remove the price signals that keep costs rational. Demand increases. Supply can't keep up. Prices explode. The Austrian economists call this the calculation problem. Without honest prices, resources get misallocated. Too many administrators, too few doctors. Too much bureaucracy, too little care. The system optimizes for extracting money rather than producing health. You eat worse because your money buys less. You pay more for healthcare because the system that funds it has no price discipline. Both trace back to the same root.

English

1

0

6

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu·3 Mar

On August 15, 1971, President Nixon made one announcement that quietly changed everything. He cut the dollar's link to gold — "temporarily." 54 years later, it's still "temporary." Since that day: - The dollar lost 87% of its purchasing power - Workers stopped sharing in productivity gains - A single income stopped being enough - Home prices went from 2x your salary to 5x - Government debt went from $398 billion to $36 trillion - The savings rate collapsed - Inequality exploded Coincidence? I'll let you decide. For the next 17 days, I'm walking through the charts from wtfhappenedin1971.com, one topic per day, and explaining in plain English what each one means for your life. No jargon. Just data. Here's the schedule: Day 1 — What happened on August 15, 1971 Day 2 — Wages vs. Productivity Day 3 — Income Inequality Day 4 — The Death of the Single-Income Family Day 5 — Inflation and Shrinkflation Day 6 — Housing Day 7 — Gold Reserves and Bretton Woods Day 8 — Government Debt Day 9 — The Rise of the Financial Sector Day 10 — Speculation vs. Real Production Day 11 — The Savings Collapse Day 12 — Trade Balance Day 13 — Political Polarization Day 14 — Crime and Incarceration Day 15 — Family Breakdown Day 16 — Healthcare and Diet Day 17 — Connecting the Dots Bookmark this. By Day 17, you'll understand why everything feels broken.

English

1

0

2

320

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu·20 Mar

WTF Happened in 1971? — Day 17/17 Seventeen days. Fifteen charts. One answer. On August 15, 1971, the dollar's link to gold was severed. Money became a political tool with no natural limit. And since that day: Your productivity soared. Your wages didn't. (Day 2) Inequality exploded — not because of greed, but because new money flows to asset holders first and workers last. (Day 3) One income stopped being enough. Both parents had to work just to maintain what one salary used to cover. (Day 4) The dollar lost 87% of its purchasing power. Your soup can got smaller. (Day 5) Housing went from 2x your salary to 5x. Not because houses improved — because money got cheaper. (Day 6) The gold drained from the vault. France called the bluff, and the leash was removed — not because it failed, but because it worked. (Day 7) Government debt went from $398 billion to $36 trillion. No gold standard, no brake. (Day 8) The financial sector swallowed the economy. Half of all corporate profits now come from moving money, not making things. (Day 9) The stock market stopped reflecting the economy and started replacing it. Speculation became more rational than production. (Day 10) Savings became irrational. Why save money that loses value every year? (Day 11) The US trade balance flipped and never came back. America started exporting paper and importing real goods. (Day 12) Political polarization accelerated. Left and Right blame each other while ignoring the monetary disease underneath. (Day 13) Crime surged. Incarceration exploded five-fold. The state grew to manage the problems its own money created. (Day 14) Families stopped forming. Not because people stopped wanting them — because the economics made it impossible. (Day 15) Healthcare costs disconnected from reality. Diet quality collapsed. When money buys less, people eat worse and pay more to treat the consequences. (Day 16) Every one of these charts breaks at the same point. Every one of them traces back to the same cause. The money. This isn't a conspiracy. It's a structure. A system that transfers wealth from those who earn it to those who print it. From the future to the present. From the young to the old. From the productive to the connected. The Austrian economists — Mises, Hayek, Rothbard — described this mechanism decades before the charts confirmed it. Sound money keeps governments honest, incentives aligned, and time preference low. Fiat money does the opposite. The question isn't whether the system is broken. The charts prove it is. The question is: what are you going to do about it? There is one asset with a fixed supply that no government can print, no central bank can inflate, and no politician can debase. But that's a thread for another day.

English

0

1

55

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu·19 Mar

WTF Happened in 1971? — Day 16/17 Healthcare costs in the US have risen faster than general inflation every single year since the early 1970s. The chart of healthcare spending vs. population growth shows costs completely disconnecting from the number of people being served. At the same time, the American diet changed dramatically. Meat consumption patterns shifted. Processed food consumption skyrocketed. Nutrition charts show a move away from whole foods toward cheaper, processed alternatives. These look like separate problems. They're not. When money loses purchasing power, people trade quality for affordability. A family in 1965 could afford whole foods, fresh meat, and regular meals on one income. A family today, squeezed by stagnant wages and rising costs, reaches for whatever is cheapest. Processed food is engineered to be cheap. It's calorie-dense, nutrient-poor, and profitable. The same inflation that made housing unaffordable made real food a luxury. And the health consequences followed — obesity, diabetes, heart disease — all of which drive healthcare costs higher. On the healthcare side, the same fiat money dynamics apply. Government involvement in healthcare expanded massively after the 1970s. When you fund healthcare with printed money and subsidized insurance, you remove the price signals that keep costs rational. Demand increases. Supply can't keep up. Prices explode. The Austrian economists call this the calculation problem. Without honest prices, resources get misallocated. Too many administrators, too few doctors. Too much bureaucracy, too little care. The system optimizes for extracting money rather than producing health. You eat worse because your money buys less. You pay more for healthcare because the system that funds it has no price discipline. Both trace back to the same root.

English

0

2

37

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu·18 Mar

WTF Happened in 1971? — Day 15/17 Marriage rates have fallen steadily since the early 1970s. Fertility dropped from 3.7 children per woman in 1960 to 1.6 today — well below replacement. Single-parent households multiplied. Family formation collapsed. Pundits blame culture, feminism, birth control, dating apps. But the charts don't break in 1995 with the internet or in 2012 with Tinder. They break in the early 1970s. The connection is economic, and it's straightforward. Family formation requires economic confidence. You get married when you can afford to build a life together. You have children when you believe you can provide for them. You stay together when the financial stress doesn't crush you. After 1971, every one of those conditions deteriorated. Wages stagnated. Housing became unaffordable. Both parents had to work. Savings declined. Debt increased. The financial foundation that families need to form and survive eroded year after year. When a young couple in 1965 looked at the future, they saw stability. A house on one income, growing savings, predictable costs. When a young couple today looks at the future, they see student debt, unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, and rising prices. Having children feels like a financial risk rather than a natural next step. Low time preference — the ability to sacrifice today for a better tomorrow — is what builds families. Sound money rewards low time preference. Fiat money punishes it. When the money encourages you to consume now rather than save for later, every long-term commitment becomes harder. Marriage, children, building something that lasts — these require the belief that the future will reward your sacrifice. Broken money breaks families. Not immediately. Not obviously. But relentlessly.

English

0

1

36

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu·17 Mar

WTF Happened in 1971? — Day 14/17 In 1972, 161 out of every 100,000 Americans were in prison. By 2007, that number was 767. A five-fold increase. The US went from a country with incarceration rates comparable to other developed nations to the highest imprisonment rate on the planet. The chart goes nearly vertical. Robbery rates surged after 1971. Violent crime across the board spiked through the 1970s and 1980s before declining. The standard explanation: the War on Drugs. And that's partly true — Nixon declared it in 1971, and Reagan escalated it in the 1980s. Harsh sentencing laws followed. Three strikes. Mandatory minimums. But why did crime surge in the first place? Economic desperation drives crime. When wages stagnate, when inflation eats purchasing power, when the cost of living outpaces earnings, some people turn to illegal means to survive. This isn't an excuse — it's a pattern that repeats across history. Mises wrote extensively about how government intervention creates unintended consequences that justify further intervention. The cycle is predictable: print money, create economic distortion, watch social problems emerge, expand the state to address those problems, fund the expansion with more money printing. The government inflated the money, which created economic stress, which drove crime up, which justified building the largest prison system in human history — all funded by more inflation. Each step makes the next one inevitable. The state expands not despite its failures, but because of them. The incarceration chart isn't a justice story. It's the downstream consequence of broken money creating a broken society that the state then uses to justify its own growth.

English

0

37

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu·16 Mar

WTF Happened in 1971? — Day 13/17 Left vs. Right. Red vs. Blue. The divide has never felt wider. But look at the Ideological Positions chart. Political polarization was stable for decades. Then, right around the early 1970s, it began to accelerate. The gap between the parties widened steadily and hasn't stopped since. The Cloture Votes chart tells the same story from inside Congress. Filibusters — procedural blocks that require 60 votes to overcome — were rare before the 1970s. Since then, they've exploded. The Senate can barely function. People blame social media, cable news, identity politics. Those are accelerants. But the fuel was there before any of them. When the economy works for most people, politics is low-stakes. You argue about details, not survival. When people feel secure, they're tolerant of disagreement. When the economy stops working — when wages stagnate, costs rise, savings evaporate, and home ownership slips away — people get angry. And angry people look for someone to blame. The Left says it's the rich, the corporations, the capitalists. The Right says it's the immigrants, the regulations, the welfare state. Both sides are pointing at symptoms while ignoring the disease. The disease is the money. Monetary debasement creates the economic stress that feeds political extremism. It creates winners and losers not by merit but by proximity to the money printer. When people sense the game is rigged — even if they can't articulate how — trust collapses. And with it, civil discourse. Rothbard observed that the state grows its power through monetary inflation. It funds programs both Left and Right want. And when those programs fail to deliver, the public fights each other instead of questioning the system that funds it all. The polarization isn't a political problem. It's a monetary symptom.

English

0

1

48

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu·15 Mar

WTF Happened in 1971? — Day 12/17 From 1870 to 1970, the United States ran trade surpluses almost every single year. For a century, America exported more than it imported. In 1971, that flipped. The US posted a $2.6 billion trade deficit — the first since 1888. It never went back. The deficit grew to $25 billion by 1980. $160 billion by 1987. Today it runs in the hundreds of billions every year. The chart is a one-way trip. What changed? Under Bretton Woods, the US had to maintain the value of the dollar because foreign governments could exchange it for gold. This meant the US couldn't simply print its way out of trade imbalances. The discipline was built in. After 1971, the US discovered something remarkable: it could run permanent deficits. Because the dollar was still the world's reserve currency, other nations had to hold dollars regardless. The US could print money, buy goods from the rest of the world, and export its inflation instead. This is what French Finance Minister Valery Giscard d'Estaing famously called the "exorbitant privilege." America imports real goods — cars, electronics, clothing — and exports paper dollars that cost nothing to produce. For American consumers, this felt like a free lunch. Cheap imports everywhere. For American producers, it was devastation. Manufacturing jobs vanished. Entire industries relocated overseas. The Rust Belt didn't rust by accident. The Austrian insight: trade deficits aren't inherently bad in a free market. But permanent, structural deficits financed by money creation aren't trade — they're extraction. One nation printing claims on real wealth that others produce. The trade balance chart isn't about competitiveness. It's about what happens when one country has the printer.

English

0

34

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu·14 Mar

WTF Happened in 1971? — Day 11/17 In the 1960s and early 1970s, Americans saved about 12% of their income. The personal savings rate peaked at 17% in 1975. By 2005, it had crashed to 1.4%. Today it hovers around 3-4%. A nation of savers became a nation of spenders in a single generation. This wasn't a cultural shift. It was a rational response to broken money. Under sound money, saving makes sense. Your money holds its value. A dollar saved today buys the same — or more — tomorrow. Thrift is rewarded. Patience pays. Under fiat money, saving is punished. Your cash loses purchasing power every year. Inflation eats it. Interest rates on savings accounts sit below the inflation rate — meaning you lose money by saving it. The system is explicitly designed to make you spend. And that's not an accident. Central bankers openly say it. They call it "stimulating demand." They want you spending, borrowing, consuming — because GDP depends on it. Saving is treated as a threat to the economy. Mises and the Austrian economists understood that savings are the foundation of real economic growth. Capital accumulation — people choosing to consume less today so they can invest in tomorrow — is what builds factories, funds innovation, and raises living standards. When you destroy the incentive to save, you destroy the engine of genuine prosperity. You get an economy hooked on consumption and debt instead of production and savings. The savings rate didn't collapse because people became irresponsible. It collapsed because the money made responsibility pointless.

English

0

1

38

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu·13 Mar

WTF Happened in 1971? — Day 10/17 The stock market used to reflect the economy. After 1971, it started replacing it. Look at the S&P 500 P/E ratio — the price investors pay per dollar of actual earnings. Before 1971, it hovered in a rational range. After 1971, it detached. Valuations climbed higher and higher, driven not by better companies but by more money chasing the same assets. The Shiller P/E ratio — which adjusts for inflation cycles — tells the same story. Stock market valuations after 1971 reached levels previously only seen in the lead-up to the 1929 crash. And they stayed there. The Speculation vs. Production chart makes it undeniable. The volume of financial speculation compared to real economic output diverged sharply after 1971. More and more of the economy's energy went into trading paper rather than building things. This is what Mises called malinvestment. When central banks push interest rates below their natural level and flood the system with cheap credit, capital doesn't flow to the most productive uses. It flows to whatever generates the highest short-term financial return. Stock buybacks instead of R&D. Financial engineering instead of product engineering. Quarterly earnings games instead of long-term value creation. The result: a stock market that goes up forever in nominal terms, while the real economy underneath stagnates. Your retirement account looks bigger on paper. But the purchasing power of those gains gets eroded by the same inflation that pumped the numbers up. It's a treadmill. You're running faster and going nowhere. The stock market didn't become a casino by accident. Fiat money made speculation more rational than production. When the money is broken, the incentives are broken.

English

0

50

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠@nmcduvogu·12 Mar

WTF Happened in 1971? — Day 9/17 In 1947, the financial sector accounted for 10% of all US corporate profits. By 2010, that number was 50%. Half of all corporate profits in America — not from building things, not from inventing things, not from feeding people — from moving money around. The financial sector's share of GDP went from about 4% in the early 1970s to nearly 9% by 2010. Bank assets ballooned. The industry that's supposed to serve the real economy became the economy. How? Under sound money, finance is a utility. Banks take in savings, lend them to productive businesses, and earn a modest spread. Boring. Essential. Small. Under fiat money, finance becomes a casino. Central banks create new money and inject it into the banking system. Banks leverage it. Financial engineers create derivatives, structured products, collateralized debt obligations — layers upon layers of complexity designed to extract fees from the flow of newly created money. None of this creates wealth. It captures wealth. Economists estimate the excess income consumed by the bloated financial sector amounts to roughly 2% of GDP — about $280 billion per year extracted from the real economy. Hayek warned that credit expansion distorts the structure of production. Capital flows not to where it's most productive, but to where it's closest to the new money. Wall Street is closer to the money printer than Main Street. Always has been. The financial sector didn't grow because the economy needed more bankers. It grew because fiat money made financial engineering more profitable than actual engineering.

English

0

2

55

Nuno Duarte⚡️🟠

Keşfet